Vers1ons

CTO, main job · since Aug 2024 · Live

Vers1ons is a licensing marketplace for remixes, where rights holders set the terms, creators buy a license, and royalties go back to every artist up the remix chain.

Vers1ons public home page with remix licensing over concert footage.

I'm the CTO of Vers1ons. I made the platform's first commit, titled "first commit," on August 15, 2024. Six days later I added the service that models the terms of a license, and for the first month nobody else committed anything. Then I built the engineering team.

In summer 2026 the team shipped music distribution. A release goes from Vers1ons, through a distribution partner, to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, TikTok and other stores. The first release went out on July 1, 2026.

I also designed the first version of the rights model every license gets checked against, and in March 2025 I wrote it up as a 17-page paper, the Tensorial Rights Framework. An engineer on the team owns the royalty math now.

Before a remix goes on sale

Vers1ons has to answer four questions about the original.

In November 2025 I started a field-by-field map of the industry data those answers need (it runs 1,664 lines now), then designed the system that uses it. The team has built most of what runs today.

Which recording is this? Audio fingerprints and the streaming catalogs match an upload to a known recording.
Which song is it, and who owns it now? AI agents in Nexus read the public songwriter and publisher registries and piece the answer together.
Has every owner said yes? Nexus is being built for this. It writes to each of them and keeps what they send back.
What can a buyer do with it, and who gets paid? The rights model checks each license and carries the original's terms into every remix made from it. Payouts go through Stripe Connect to every artist up the remix chain.

The last question is the easiest to show. Here's the royalty simulator from vers1ons.com. Another engineer built it, and it runs the same math as the platform's royalty code. On its opening numbers, the newest version earns $620 from streams and pays $248 to the version it came from. That version passes $37.20 to the one before it, and $3.72 reaches the original, three versions away.

vers1ons.com/royalty-simulator ↗

The royalty simulator from vers1ons.com. Change the splits and watch a license payment flow back up the remix chain.

Who writes the code now

The engineers write most of the code now. In February 2026 I gave each of them a part of the product to own.

They work from a shared set of agent skills, the written instructions their coding agents follow. I set up the ones they started with, and they've since written their own, like the rulebook for the design system and a skill for splitting royalties.

One of the engineers built preview environments: any branch gets one from a Slack command, and it deletes itself after a day.

Nexus, the tool that asks every owner of a song for a yes, started as a weekend build of mine in May 2026. An engineer on the team rebuilt its outreach flow in August and has run it since.

This year I rebuilt how the platform models a label. The company that licenses the music and the person who signs for it are now separate parties, and being allowed to list a label's songs no longer means you're allowed to sign for the label.

In September I built Vers1ons Charts, a list of the remixes, edits and sped-up versions on the big platforms' charts, refreshed every morning. It names the original behind a version only when it's sure of the match. One night, working until 3:30 a.m., I found a new way to use Claude to match far more of them.

Then I put the model calls from Charts and the platform's AI agents behind one model gateway, so in production only the gateway holds the provider keys.

I still ship code for the platform nearly every week.